Thanks, guys.
I already posted a pretty newbie question there two days ago, 142 views, no replies. Not sure if that's normal or my question was too basic. CGTalk seems like a place for power users.
I'll post at simplymaya as well.

Can anybody suggest a good community where I can post various Maya new user questions? I'm a long-time C4D user who needs to work with Maya for my new job.
I've found C4D cafe incredibly helpful and a generally friendly place to trade notes, learn and share techniques.
Any suggestions for an equivalent for Maya? CG Society's Maya forums seems focused on power users.
Cheers,

Thanks for the detailed reply. It a pity that toon shading seems to be a GPU blind spot. Perhaps there's a workraound?
Also how hot and noisy do the GPUs get? Hand on the hood of a car after a long drive or 1 inch from a candle hot? Will I have an annoying fan noise during renders?

I’m a long-time Mac user looking into upgrading to a more modern Windows PC based C4D setup. I have a trash can Mac that's getting old. It's a little unclear what performance boosts I’d generally be getting with GPU based setup - discussions and tutes tend to be specialized and advanced.
I’ve done some initial research, and Octane seems the most popular setup, but I still have some newbie questions:
Would Octane or GPU cards boost toon shading?
Would Octane or GPU cards boost the handling of large scene files? Would I need a viewport card?
Would Octane or GPU cards boost character-oriented simulations like hair and cloth?
How hot do all these GPU cards get? I live in a tropical island, and my rooftop office already maxes out the A/C! Should I upgrade my old monitors too?
Also, will I get an overall speed boost with a more modern GPU oriented setup, or will the performance boost come to a hard stop if a feature isn’t mentioned in reviews?
Regarding last question, I’m seeing lots of vids showing amazing real-time renders of, say, Blurry-Reflections+DOF. But if I don’t use BR+DOF that much (or whatever the specific feature is) am I wasting money?
I notice people often reply to post like this one with: “It depends on what you want and are trying to do.” To answer: I use C4D as a professional supplement to my media teaching work. I generally freelance during my summers or breaks. I’ve done a mix of mograph and character animation for documentaries plus title designs. I plan to move into character-based illustration and editorial work as well.
So I’m more of an indie guy - I don’t see myself doing ad agency or photo-realistic VFX work. I like the illustrative, graphic, “toon” 3D style more. That said, some of my work has involved large scene files, like Chinese landscapes or showing trends using cityscapes. Some renders have taken 10-15 minutes per 2K frame.

A belated thank you Sigor. (for some reason I'm just getting this now).
Looks like the Maya demands of the upcoming job will be less intense than I expected: character animation with pre-made rigs. The motion graphics part will be done in After Effects. I remember setting up Maya for Character Animation was pretty straightforward. The art of animation is the hard part, but that's true in any program.
Nonetheless, its time to learn Maya regardless. Whether it deserves the status of industry standard or not, the perception is certainly there, and definitely at my new workplace.

Thanks, that does help! #3 sounds the most promising. I live in a tropical climate, so I'm constantly inspired by the amazing plant life out here. I'd like to re-create the leaf textures in these pictures, but not photo realistically, but in a graphical / cartoony style.

Photoshop has a gradient feature called shape burst (see image). Is this possible within C4D using a polygon's edge as the source of a gradient? It would be great for making leaf and flower petal textures, window shades on building models, and I'm sure many other uses. If Edge selections were also possible to drive this, that'd be even better.
The only way I could see doing this would be to use the edge to spline feature and then make the spline drive a proximal shader. But that's a lot of work, and it would be hard to create a flower garden this way. And the proximal shader's gradient features seem pretty basic, too.

No offense intended. Also, to be clear, I'm not encouraging people to leave C4D. Perhaps "moving my old C4D workflows to Maya" would be a better choice of words for the topic subject.
I posted on a C4D forum because I get the sense that Maya users won't understand the perspective of long-time C4D user. I also get the sense that C4D doesn't get the respect it deserves from the general 3D community. So I thought I'd get more sympathetic responses at the C4D cafe.
But for better or worse, Maya does remain the industry standard. Knowing how it works can't hurt a C4D user, whether for practical job-related reasons like mine, or just general knowledge.

Could anybody share their experience on learning Maya when you primarily use C4D? I fiddled a bit with Maya in college as a 3D newbie, but I hated it. I’ve got a job coming up this fall that requires I work primarily in Maya. I never used Maya again after discovering C4D. That was many years ago, and now I’m comfortable with 3D workflows and concepts.
I remember Maya’s workflows were radically different from C4D. Some of the questions I have:
Does it have an Object manager? (I remember it didn’t – drove me crazy)
How similar is MASH to the MoGraph Module?
Has Maya’s UI gotten any better? How do you cope with it? (I remember cmd-Q didn’t quit the program!)
Any other workflows that would seem strange to a C4D user? (I remember a weird workflow that was like Photoshop’s history panel, but allowed different history stages interact with each other.)
Are there some things about Maya you like better than C4D? (I’m hoping the node-based shader will be a pleasant change.)
Most of all…will it be easier to learn a second time around if you’re now good at C4D?
I realize these are general questions, but any thoughts appreciated. I tried to Google this a bit, but found very few tutorials or overviews on the subject. Hope this is the right place for this post.